Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “They cross the Channel at midnight. There are twelve and they are named for songs: Stardust and Stormy Weather and In the Mood and Pistol-Packin’ Mama. The sea glides along far below, spattered with the countless chevrons of whitecaps. Soon enough, the navigators can discern the low moonlit lumps of islands ranged along the horizon.”

— Anthony Doerr

52. “This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.”

— Anthony Doerr

53. “Frederick said we don’t have choices, don’t own our lives, but in the end it was Werner who pretended there were no choices, Werner who watched Frederick dump the pail of water at his feet-I will not- Werner who stood by as the consequences came raining down.”

— Anthony Doerr

54. “War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.”

— Anthony Doerr

55. “You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

— Anthony Doerr

56. “Marie-Laure hears Madame Manec: You must never stop believing.”

— Anthony Doerr

57. “Von Rumpel laughs. He appreciates that they are trying to play the game. But don’t they understand that the winner has already been determined? He.”

— Anthony Doerr

58. “The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

— Anthony Doerr

59. “The war that killed your grandfather killed sixteen million others. One and a half million French boys alone, most of them younger than I was. Two million on the German side. March the dead in a single-file line, and for eleven days and eleven nights, they’d walk past our door.”

— Anthony Doerr

60. “To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”

— Anthony Doerr

61. “What ways? Whom have you put your trust in?” “You have to trust someone sometime.” “If your same blood doesn’t run in the arms and legs of the person you’re next to, you can’t trust anything. And even then. It’s not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it’s a system. How do you fight a system?” “You try.”

— Anthony Doerr

62. “I am only alive because I have not yet died.”

— Anthony Doerr

63. “Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest. “it’s so big,” she whispers. “You can do this, Marie.” She cannot.”

— Anthony Doerr

64. “Jutta opens her eyes but doesn’t look at him. ‘Don’t tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don’t lie to me.”

— Anthony Doerr

65. “Frederick said we don’t have choices, don’t own our lives, but in the end it was Werner who pretended there were no choices, Werner who watched Frederick dump the pail of water at his feet – I will not – Werner who stood by as the consequences came raining down. Werner who watched Volkheimer wade into house after house, the same ravening nightmare recurring over and over and over.”

— Anthony Doerr

66. “Gravity and time. Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.”

— Anthony Doerr

67. “You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest.”

— Anthony Doerr

68. “They’ll say you’re too little, Werner, that you’re from nowhere, that you shouldn’t dream big. But I believe in you. I think you’ll do something great.”

— Anthony Doerr

69. “What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”

— Anthony Doerr

70. “Somewhere, someone is figuring out how to push back the hood of grief, but Marie-Laure cannot. Not yet. The truth is that she is a disabled girl with no home and no parents.”

— Anthony Doerr

71. “Live faithfully, fight bravely, and die laughing.”

— Anthony Doerr

72. “But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.”

— Anthony Doerr

73. “Her father says to tamp down her imagination. Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck. Some things are simply more rare than others, and that’s why there are locks. “But, Papa, do you believe it’s real?” “The diamond or the curse?” “Both. Either.” “They’re just stories, Marie.”

— Anthony Doerr

74. “Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?” He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”

— Anthony Doerr

75. “Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters.”

— Anthony Doerr

76. “He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”

— Anthony Doerr

77. “A dozen pigeons roosting on the cathedral spire cataract down its length and wheel out over the sea.”

— Anthony Doerr

78. “Lord Our God Your Grace is a purifying fire.”

— Anthony Doerr

79. “He says, “You are very brave.” She lowers the bucket. “What is your name?” He tells her. She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?” He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”

— Anthony Doerr

80. “So really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

— Anthony Doerr

81. “But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?” He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”

— Anthony Doerr

82. “There are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together.”

— Anthony Doerr

83. “Marie-Laure is glad to hear a smile enter his voice. But beneath it she can sense his thoughts fluttering like trapped birds.”

— Anthony Doerr

84. “You will eat country and breathe nation.”

— Anthony Doerr

85. “Nature demands symmetry.”

— Anthony Doerr

86. “Because of the diamond in your coat pocket. Because I left it here to protect you. All it has done is put me in more danger. Then why hasn’t the house been hit? Why hasn’t it caught fire? It’s a rock, Papa. A pebble. There is only luck, bad or good. Chance and physics. Remember? You are alive. I am only alive because I have not yet died.”

— Anthony Doerr

87. “Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children’s House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines.”

— Anthony Doerr

88. “A corner of the night sky, beyond a wall of trees, blooms red. In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, racing in all directions, and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he’s looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark.”

— Anthony Doerr

89. “All day Marie-Laure lies on her stomach and reads. Logic, reason, pure science: these, Aronnax insists, are the proper ways to pursue a mystery. Not fables and fairy tales.”

— Anthony Doerr

90. “A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.”

— Anthony Doerr

91. “He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back. Through the panel he calls, “I am not killing you. I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.” He pauses, fumbling to translate. “The song, light of the moon?” She almost smiles.”

— Anthony Doerr

92. “Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.”

— Anthony Doerr

93. “Every part of him wants to scream: is this not wrong? But here it is right.”

— Anthony Doerr

94. “A scientist’s work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time. Everything has led to this.”

— Anthony Doerr

95. “Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience – buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello – become new all over again.”

— Anthony Doerr

96. “What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.”

— Anthony Doerr

97. “Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.”

— Anthony Doerr

98. “Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.”

— Anthony Doerr

99. “To really touch something, she is learning – the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Etymology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard’s workshop – is to love it.”

— Anthony Doerr

100. “To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”

— Anthony Doerr